Advice

It's been kind of quiet here in Glendale the last year, with developers too broke to fire up the neighborhood associations with mega-anything and the idiots in Bell stealing all the prime headlines. Rumors are beginning to circulate about City Council candidates testing the waters, and you can almost feel the anticipation. Maybe it's more of an odor. I have never had a seat at the table in any of those back rooms I've heard about, though, so I won't have any worthwhile gossip to share.

I 'd like to offer a few words of advice to the graduates around town, assuming there are graduates who get their news from someplace other than Twitter. First, lie in a pool and do nothing — unless you have a suggestion on how to stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. In that case, get down there right away, save the world, and then hit the jacuzzi. This could be the last time you legitimately have the opportunity to sponge off your parents, if they haven't already cut you off. You'll be gainfully employed soon enough.

Alecia Foster GLENDALE GALLERIA -- It's free and it's legal. Members of the Glendale Bar Association will donate their expertise May 6 during a day of free legal advice. The annual event, sponsored by the association's Legal Referral Service, will provide the public a chance to receive free legal consultations on everything from labor law to real estate and collections issues. "We've been able to cover most of the questions people come up with," said Kathy Bond, executive director of The Glendale Bar Association, host of the event.

This week students all over town are returning (or were supposed to be returning) to school. What advice can you give to students as they walk back into the classroom for another year? ? Let?s use the fire ? which is uppermost in all of our minds anyway ? to talk about starting up a new year of school. 1. All of those firefighters up in our mountains have shown us what perseverance is. They haven?t given up, even though they must be miserably uncomfortable and have not yet (at this writing)

Recently, a reader asked me whether she should correct the grammar of a linguistically challenged co-worker. My answer: know. No, that?s not a misspelling of ?no.? It?s my way of driving home the point that, if you want to offer unsolicited and potentially unwelcome language advice, there are some important things to know before you proceed: Know, as best you can, whether your co-worker might be receptive to unsolicited advice. Know the location of the nearest emergency exit in case she?

Even though they’re not graduating from middle school this year, the seventh-graders in Shannon Estrada’s English class at Rosemont Middle School were asked to reflect Wednesday on the advice they would give to their graduating classmates if they were to compose a graduation speech. Estrada played several pieces of poetry recorded on various compact discs for her students, and one of the poems was the graduation-advice-column-turned-pop-music-single, the “Wear Sunscreen” speech.

Claudia Peschiutta GLENDALE -- As Rep. James Rogan (R-Glendale) prepared Wednesday to leave behind the stately halls of Congress, his successor was getting ready to move in. Rep.-elect Adam Schiff, who will remain Glendale's state senator through November, and 42 fellow freshman House members this week began their congressional orientation. "We have literally been in meetings back to back to back," said a tired Schiff during a telephone interview on Wednesday.

While most businesses have seen their profits suffer from the downward economy, some Glendale fortunetellers have noticed a boost in their clientele. Psychic Doreen Lee, 28, has seen a 20% to 25% increase in the number of people who go to her seeking advice and details about their future. But she is unclear whether the boost is linked to the economy or people wanting advice for the new year. “More people have been coming in and asking about whether it is a good time to buy a house,” Lee said.

"John quickly pulled out his gun, shakily aimed it at Joe, and angrily shot him dead." There's one way you might write a line of fiction (or, if you're a member of my immediate family, memoir). Here's another. "John pulled out his gun, aimed it at Joe, and shot him dead." I tell you this not to offer you a glimpse into typical rural Florida family life, but to highlight some widespread advice about adverbs. The refrain goes like this: Adverbs bad. Don't use adverbs. They mess up your prose and smush up your point.

A concerned residents group filed a lawsuit this week asking a Los Angeles County judge to force Glendale to stop transferring tens of millions of dollars from its utility to the city's coffers and return $90 million it had shifted from one fund to another since 2010. “These transfers amount to hidden taxes that are unlawful unless submitted to a vote” of the people, said Arthur Jarvis Cohen, attorney for the Coalition for Better Government, at a press conference in front of City Hall Wednesday.

ALTADENA - While Ramses Barden stands in the middle of a critical crossroads in his career, the first-time free agent and possibly former New York Giants wide receiver took a timeout to speak at a local children's mental-health service. Barden visited Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services' all-boys residential treatment facility in his hometown of Altadena Wednesday. The Flintridge Prep graduate shared with the group of around 40 people about keys to success and following your dream.

State Sen. Carol Liu teamed up with 10-year-old Gerry Orz on Wednesday to talk about the bullying that plagues local schools. As a third-grader in the San Gabriel Unified School District last year, Gerry was bullied for having two moms and for being too tall, among other things. “Kids would kick him to the ground. His pants were torn up,” his mother, Kate Orz, said. But Gerry didn't say a word on Wednesday because he had taken a daylong vow of silence to honor those who suffered from bullying this year.

The Pasadena law firm that defended Glendale in lawsuits stemming from a 2005 mudslide that cost the city nearly $15.4 million has agreed to pay $98,500 to settle a malpractice lawsuit, according to a City Council announcement this week. Glendale sued the firm, Sabaitis-O'Callaghan, in 2011, claiming that its legal advice led to the city losing out on an attempt to recoup a nearly $1-million payout to residents who had filed a damage claim, according to Los Angeles County Superior Court records.

I don't usually read advice columns. If I need to tell my great-grandmother to lay off the Cuervo or tell a co-worker I don't want to attend her nudist wedding, I can find the words without any help. Besides, as anyone with a computer keyboard knows, it's more fun to give advice than to listen to it. But when I'm flipping through the newspaper on a lazy Sunday, anything can catch my eye, as did this sentence from a recent “Ask Amy” advice column: “Reach out to whomever is in charge of the arrangements.” It's ironic, because it illustrates one of my favorite pieces of advice: Don't bother with “whom.” I know that's an odd thing for a grammar buff to say. “Whom” is, after all, the quintessential icon of grammatical propriety.

I'd like to offer the graduates in our area a belated congratulations and a tidbit of advice - because you haven't received enough of that in the last couple of weeks, right? Over the past couple of years, my message to the cap-and-gown crowd has focused on getting some sun and enjoying the brief summer respite before life hits you right in the face with a fire hose. This time, I'm not going to weigh down my words of wisdom with a “don't worry, be happy” mantra. But I would like to examine another chestnut of commencement season: “The world is your oyster.” I am reasonably sure that whoever penned this philosophical tidbit was the kind of eternal optimist who sees the glass half full.

In 2008, when I started writing this column, I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily, neither did the editors of this paper, so I've been allowed to ramble on each week since. I'm not a journalist and I never set out to be a columnist. When the honor was offered to me, I took it with fear and trepidation. Like parenting, or any life hurdle we're woefully ill-prepared for, it's helpful to turn to those that came before us for advice. But I didn't know any newspaper columnists.

Last year about this time, I was pontificating to graduates about setting realistic expectations and telling them to get used to a world that is going to try to beat them down. Of course, I surrounded those nuggets of sage advice by further suggesting that a good dose of lounging by the pool should precede any attempt to dive right into the workplace. For the record, I still stand by that last bit of advice. Now, as for the other bit of advice — the part where I told last year’s graduating class to prepare for a pummeling at the hands of a cold, cruel world.

The Geopolitics Club at Clark Magnet High School had their second chat last week with Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1955 to 1964. The high school students were dressed up for the occasion in suits, ties and dresses as they spoke with Khrushchev in a video call using Skype. The club approached cinema teacher Matt Stroup to ask if Stroup could connect Khrushchev on a conference earlier this year. Club president Grigori Grigoryan sent an email to Khrushchev’s university email account after learning he was a professor at Brown University, where he has worked since 1991.

It's been kind of quiet here in Glendale the last year, with developers too broke to fire up the neighborhood associations with mega-anything and the idiots in Bell stealing all the prime headlines. Rumors are beginning to circulate about City Council candidates testing the waters, and you can almost feel the anticipation. Maybe it's more of an odor. I have never had a seat at the table in any of those back rooms I've heard about, though, so I won't have any worthwhile gossip to share.